Inflexible adjustment of expectations affects cognitive-emotional conflict control in adolescents with autism spectrum disorder

Abstract Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is marked by a range of challenges including cognitive and socio-emotional differences as well as difficulties to flexibly adjust to unpredictable situations. It has recently been suggested that people with ASD hold rigid expectations about upcoming events that tend to be shaped by information that is unlikely to repeat in the future. Prior expectations play an important role for proactive conflict control exemplified in the Gratton, or the congruency sequence effect (CSE). Here, we examine proactive cognitive-emotional conflict control in ASD compared to neuro-typical controls and the underlying neurophysiological and functional neuroanatomical processes using EEG methods and an emotional Stroop task with sequentially manipulated trial transitions. We show that, in ASD the presence of cognitive-emotional conflict in a previous trial affects the ability to process emotional conflict in a subsequent trial. That is, ASD individuals show a prominent CSE effect on emotional stimuli while neuro-typical controls do not. The neurophysiological data revealed that this proactive reconfiguration of stimulus-response associations during conflict resolution is associated with activation within anterior cingulate (BA24 and 32) and insular cortices (BA13). Purely perceptual, attentional and motor response-related processes could not explain these effects. Our results suggest that when faced with cognitive-emotional conflict, ASD individuals seem to rely on their subjective expectation about an upcoming trial type independent of the objective likelihood of that upcoming trial transition. The present results lend support to theoretical propositions on precision weighting of prediction error in ASD and have theoretical and clinical implications in the context of cognitive-emotional regulation and conflict control.